What is Precision Neurocognition? David J Libon, PhD, Provides an Overview

"So now we have a piece of technology that can exquisitely record all responses to questions when mental status testing is undertaken..."

During a recent interview with Patient Care, David J Libon, PhD, a professor at the New Jersey Institute for Successful Aging at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, explained that the piece of technology that can so exquisitely record all responses during mental status testing is the iPad. And the iPad is a key tool that makes precision neurocognition possible.

With long-time colleague Rodney Swenson, PhD, and fellow researchers, Libon recently published a paper that defines precision neurocognition as follows:

Precision neurocognition is a heuristic that seeks to deploy new methods that can operationally define subtle neurocognitive alterations that might predict the emergence of [mild cognitive impairment] and dementia.

Using traditional cognitive assessment tests that have been designed for use on digital technology, precision neurocognition techniques identify fine departures from average test-response behavior that may signal changes indicative of changes in cognition long before those are telegraphed in behavior.

In the short video above, Libon describes the concept of precision neurocognition.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for style.

Patient Care: Dr Libon, would you describe or define the concept of precision neurocognition and how it differs from traditional approaches to cognitive assessment?

David J Libon, PhD: Sure. First, thank you for having us this morning—we greatly appreciate the opportunity.

So, when we're talking about the term precision neurocognition, what we're really talking about is a way to leverage cutting-edge technology to aid in mental status testing in the office—say, in primary care—or really, in any healthcare venue.

The kind of technology we're talking about is using an iPad. When you think about it, an iPad functions in a similar fashion to a tape recorder—it will record speech verbatim. And it also functions as a tablet, so if you use a stylus, it will record drawings. So now we have a piece of technology that can exquisitely record all responding to questions when mental status testing is undertaken by physicians or healthcare providers.

With the technology now, we're able to extract measures of reaction time, latency, voice, and graphomotor output that just were not possible previously. And it's really not that expensive—we’re really just talking about the investment in buying the iPad.

But I think the implications here, with respect to precision neurocognition and doing testing with technology like the iPad, are going to be so profound that I typically analogize it to when MRI was first introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s.